Private Michael Connolly
Michael Connolly was born on October 20, 1893 in Plumbridge, County Tyrone, Ireland. He was 23 years of age, lived in Paris and was working as a farmer when he enlisted with the 215th Battalion. We know little of his military service, except that he served in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, because he is remembered at the Vimy Memorial.
In the spring of 1917, the French and British planned a new offensive in the hope of breaking through the German lines and ending the stalemate. Time was of the essence: all the armies were depleted from years of fighting and struggling to fill their ranks with new recruits. The Russian Revolution was also underway, with the revolutionists threatening to pull Russia (one of the key Allied nations) out of the war. A Russian withdrawal would effectively bring the war to an end in the East, allowing Germany to focus more of its forces on the Western Front.
Vimy Ridge is an unusually prominent, 7 km-long escarpment rising amid the open countryside north of the town of Arras. To the north and east of the ridge are the Douai plain and the important coal mining city of Lens — in 1917 both were occupied by Germany. To the west and south were the British lines and unoccupied France. German forces had been entrenched on the heights of the ridge since nearly the beginning of the war in 1914, despite several attempts to dislodge them. More than 150,000 French soldiers had been killed and wounded in previous efforts to recapture the ridge.
In early 1917, British High Command ordered the Canadian Corps to capture the position as part of a larger spring offensive in the Arras area. In the coming campaign, British forces to the south would have limited success, and the French would fail badly, with many of their units reduced to mutiny. But the Canadian attack against Vimy Ridge would be a spectacular victory by comparison.
Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng, the Canadian Corps commander, ordered new tactics for the coming assault. Having learned from the Battle of the Somme, intense training better prepared soldiers for what they might find on the battlefield and helped them to make quick decisions on their own that were still in keeping with the overall plan. Small units and individual soldiers were given much more information about the battle and were expected to exercise initiative in keeping the advance moving, even if their officers were killed or wounded.
In addition, the Canadian planners employed another effective strategy, the creeping barrage. The plan was to direct shellfire just ahead of advancing Canadian troops who slowly moved forward in timed increments. The artillery acted like a moving shield to keep enemy soldiers in their trenches, allowing advancing friendly infantry to follow closely behind, effectively "creeping" across no-man's-land with fewer casualties. A tremendous artillery barrage, which included improved techniques for counter-battery fire against enemy guns, would smash German positions and isolate enemy troops in their dugouts.
At 5:30 a.m. on 9 April 1917, Easter Monday, nearly 1,000 guns opened fire on the German positions. An estimated 15,000 Canadians rose from the trenches and advanced towards the ridge in the first wave, with thousands more behind them. Despite hard fighting all across the front, the Canadians captured most of the ridge on the 9th, and the remaining portions of it by the 12th.
Over four days of bloody fighting, the Canadians had overrun Vimy Ridge at the cost of more than 10,600 killed and wounded. It was the largest territorial advance up to that point in the war. The battle has since become an important symbol for Canada, the place where Canadians from across the country delivered an unprecedented victory, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fighting together for the first time in the war. The victory at Vimy was a defining event for Canada, considered by many contemporaries and later scholars to be a significant event in Canada’s progress to full independence from Britain.
Michael was killed in action on August 10, 1918, three months before the First World War ended. He is also commemorated at the Sacred Heart Catholic Cemetery in Paris.